German Colonial History: New Trends and Perspectives ABSTRACT: Since the mid-1990s, the history of colonialism has emerged as one of the most active and innovative fields in German historiography. This article reconstructs a genealogy of scholarly interest in the colonial dimension of the German past and describes the current vogue as the third phase of intense academic debate. In the second part of the article, the cultural turn in studies of colonialism is explored, and four areas that have received particular attention in recent work are discussed: histories of representation, colonial knowledge, identities and memory, and finally the issue of violence, war, and genocide.